Top 5 Marketing Automation Software for Small Businesses for 2018

These days online marketing is very much about connection with consumers. With social media in the mix, inbound marketing involves creating compelling and shareable content for your visitors.

With advertising becoming more and more about content marketing, professionals and freelancers alike can find the process to be increasingly time consuming. Marketing automation software brings both intelligence and efficiency to the modern age of marketing efforts.

Marketing automation tools free up a lot of the time required to stay on top of new blog posts, videos, comments, social media posts and more. To help you take advantage of these benefits, we’ve narrowed the many tools available down to the top 5 marketing automation software options. The first three are based on products awarded a Top Rated badge on TrustRadius for 2018, while the last two will work particularly well for freelancers and social media marketers.

HubSpot is one of the most well known inbound marketing tools out there. The software features include content management, SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, analytics and more. Marketers can use the tool for social listening, and utilize the results to automate engagement tracking and social media scheduling. The all-in-one approach means marketers can keep a cohesive voice across landing pages, social media and email campaigns. Many Hubspot users praise HubSpot’s support team and overall tracking capabilities.

Hatchbuck combines sales and marketing in its all-in-one approach to CRM, marketing automation and email marketing. The automation element of the software provides a customizable drip campaigns. Users can also create a unique visitor experience on their company landing pages – pages that convert better and create more leads. Across both email and web, Hatchbuck can automatically create tasks for both the marketing and sales team to ensure prospects aren’t lost in the shuffle.

Marketo is another big name in marketing automation software. With email marketing, SEO and social media content offerings, the tool offers quite a bit of range for small businesses and freelancers alike. Marketo allows marketers to engage with customers to create brand ambassadors, and use analytics for social retargeting. All in all, the software brings an automated approach to personalization for both B2B and B2C marketers. Marketo reviewers on TrustRadius highlight the product’s multiple integrations and it’s widespread community willing to share tips and best practices.

HootSuite focuses in on the social media element of inbound marketing. The automation tool lets users schedule new content – hundreds of posts at a time across all of their social media platforms. Social scheduling alone can save marketers quite a bit of time. Users can also use the HootSuite plugin to save and curate content as they browse social media and the web, saving time on the frontend of content creation.

SocialFlow has a reputation for helping brands publish content that is more likely to be shared and social media and the web. More recently, the tool has taken to automation to improve its offerings. Users can now automatically recycle content and set rules for off-hours publishing and optimized scheduling. It can help smaller brands get noticed through social media marketing.

If you’d like more information on the pros and cons of these marketing automation tools, online customer reviews are a great place to get started. Authentic reviews will help you narrow down your software options to something that will work for your marketing automation needs as a social media manager or freelancer!

About Author – Brooklin Nash writes about the latest tools and small business trends for TrustRadius. When he’s not writing, you can find him reading YA dystopian fiction (with guilty pleasure) and cooking.

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